SUSE Brings Live Patching and Ceph Storage to Its Enterprise Linux

Enterprise Linux vendor SUSE today made a series of announcements at its annual SUSEcon event, providing users with new patching, storage and cloud capabilities.

The new SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching technology is derived from the open-source kGraft project that SUSE has been leading in the upstream Linux community. The kGraft project is about enabling patching of a live running kernel without the need to shut down an entire system.

There are multiple efforts in the Linux ecosystem for live kernel patching that compete with what SUSE is doing. Red Hat has a technology called kpatch that enables live kernel patching, and the first vendor to fully embrace and develop live kernel patching was KSplice, which is now owned by Oracle.

"In addition to increasing service availability by updating critical kernel patches without rebooting, and reducing the need for planned downtime by patching frequently, SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching preserves security and stability by applying up-to-date patches," said Matthias Eckermann, senior product manager for SUSE, in a statement.

"It's a fully open-source solution that features zero-interruption interaction with the system and a familiar deployment method," Eckermann continued. "It's ideal for mission-critical systems, in-memory databases, extended simulations or quick fixes in a large server farm."

Storage

SUSE also announced a Beta preview of its SUSE Storage product, which is based on the open-source Ceph project. While Ceph is an open-source effort, Inktank, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ceph project, was acquired by SUSE rival Red Hat in April for $175 million.

Ceph is a distributed storage filesystem that is popular for use in OpenStack cloud deployments.

Cloud

The cloud is increasingly being considered by enterprises as a place to deploy Linux workloads. As such, there are organizations that might want to migrate an existing SUSE Enterprise Linux subscription, which is an activity that SUSE now enables.

"Portable subscriptions provide our customers with the flexibility to run on-premise or in the cloud, while maintaining enterprise support for their mission-critical workloads," Naji Almahmoud, global head of business development for SUSE, said in a statement.